Submission Benefits: General
Submission Benefits: General
If your writing leans toward the liminal and the uncanny, then submitting your work to one of GossamerWight’s quarterly digital anthologies may feel like a homecoming. We’re especially drawn to writing that shows sustained, uncanny destabilisation rather than single twist endings; that acknowledges awe alongside dread, allowing for moments of strange beauty, wonder, or possibility to surface through the disorientation; to characters who respond not with fear alone but with curiosity, resilience, care, and hard-won hope in an unreliable and often hostile world.
Appearing in one of our anthologies provides more than a publication credit alone, as worthy as that is; it places your prose and poetry front and centre, drawing in an active and appreciative audience who are seeking precisely your kind of writing. The opportunity for you to find your ideal writing niche at just the right moment is facilitated by our rolling quarterly anthology calls; themed editions that delve into horror – both mainstream and folk – and into the weird, New Weird, speculative, dystopian, supernatural, spectral, fantasy, and Gothic realms.
Visibility and readership
One of the most immediate benefits of submitting your prose or poetry to us is increased visibility. Because our digital anthologies remain continually available to download without charge from our online store as either a PDF or ePub, your accepted work can reach an international audience – a readership genuinely interested in and engaged with the genres and subgenres that comprise our core interests, within which your story or verse nestles.
Professional presence
Publication in a respected literary magazine anthology will add actual weight to your professional profile. A story or piece of poetry accepted by us provides you with tangible credit for many things: your author biography, curriculum vitae or literary résumé; as support with your future submissions, applications, and queries. Our online store also constitutes an online archive, providing the work of our successful anthology contributors with a lasting presence – allowing it to remain searchable and linkable for the life of GossamerWight Literary Magazine.
Community and connection
We value the genuine sense of connection we share with our online community. Those who contribute to our website, and to our anthologies in particular, also find themselves drawn into a wider circle of writers, readers, and associated industry professionals, all sharing a common aesthetic interest – a community of like-minded people with vision and drive.
Editorial care and creative growth
For each story or piece of poetry we accept, we offer brief editorial notes to the successful contributor as part of our submissions process – in the acceptance letter we send, and sometimes within the email body to which that letter is attached. We appreciate that even a short sentence or two from us can be valuable, helping a writer to appreciate what’s strong in a piece and where refinement would strengthen and sharpen it further. Creative growth is also to be found in us sharing our contributors’ work across our social networks, and from the comments and support those posts often receive; or from writer and reader engagement with our newsletters. We are always seeking ways to both enhance our editorial care and to foster creative growth – both ours and that of our contributors.
Career development
We’ve already stated some benefits to writers who partner with us, but let’s say something more about how your publication history with us may support your wider career goals. Apart from giving hands-on experience with submission workflows, deadlines, and promotion, being published in a literary magazine anthology may help you when submitting pieces of your work to literary contests, awards, and other anthologies, or to meet any other opportunity that requires evidence of prior publication. Also, appearing in one of our anthologies may help introduce your writing to other editors, agents, and small presses monitoring specialist literary magazines like ours for emerging voices.
Speaking of contests and awards, we now nominate outstanding poetry and prose from among our successful anthology contributors to six of the world’s most respected literary awards. We do this in the belief that the writers who publish with us deserve every chance for their work to find the recognition it merits. Our nominations are one of the most direct forms of advocacy we, as editors, can offer our writers. Another example of a meaningful career development opportunity. See our Awards and Nominations page for more details.
Rights and future use
Writers should always keep full ownership of their work. To make our position clear, you will always keep the copyright to your work, while we hold the collective copyright in the issue or anthology in which your work appears. If your work is later republished elsewhere, we ask that you acknowledge its original appearance with us by stating, for example, the following or similar: “First published in issue [issue or anthology edition name] by GossamerWight Literary Magazine”. Clear rights terms are standard practice in literary publishing, helping ensure that writers can make informed decisions about where and how their work appears.
Creative freedom
Genre-focused magazines, like ours, also offer enhanced creative freedom. This means we welcome writers who are not afraid to take risks with their writing, whether that means giving us an unusual structure, a hybrid form, an unsettling, uncanny atmosphere (actively encouraged by us!) or a thematic presentation that would not always suit a more conventional literary destination. We cannot guarantee acceptance of such work from you, of course, but we can promise to read your submission with great care and an open mind, always valuing work that engages with our editorial interests in original and thoughtful ways.
Digital and physical print anthologies
Although we publish all our anthologies digitally, we maintain an open invitation to self to provide an annual print on paper anthology at some future point. This would comprise an assortment of the best-of-the-best stories and poetry from our themed digital quarterly anthologies, with additional newly sourced submissions from an open call for that edition. Should we accept your work for publication in one of our digital anthologies, then we’ll automatically consider you for inclusion in any physical print anthology.
If you’re thinking of making a prose or poetry submission to us, we hope you’ll do so with unabashed confidence. A strong submission is so much more than an opportunity to be published; it is a direct way of placing your work in front of readers ready to meet your words with curiosity, attention, and care. So, if your writing aligns with our interests, and especially with that of any anthology call, then we want to hear from you!
What next?
To guide you further, please visit the following website pages:
Our Team – Meet your editors and our in-house mascot.
FAQs – Answers to our contributors’ and readers’ common questions.
Submissions: General Guidance – Give yourself the best chance of having your work accepted.
Current anthology call – See our home page for the current anthology theme and deadline.
Not Selected? Read Me – Helpful guidance for all submitters, including how we select work.
Our Anthologies – Explore previously published work and get a sense of our magazine’s style by downloading the linked examples.
Voluntary fees: we accept voluntary fees (‘tip jar’ payments) for all submission types. Should you wish to tip, please use our Buy Me A Coffee link below. Thank you!
